Conventional Wisdom
Sure, this year’s Republican convention marks a disruption in the space-time continuum. But can it live up to that time Walter Cronkite tried to make Reagan and Ford “co-presidents?”
This is the first year in a long time when it seems as if anything — and by anything, I mean Scott Baio — might happen during the conventions. Up til now the biggest fiasco on record was the Democrats in 68. Then, Daley’s police had battled 10,000 anti-war protestors on the streets. Inside, Dan Rather was hauled off by security after trying to interview a delegate from Georgia. “Take your hands off me,” Rather said to the guards on-camera, “unless you plan to arrest me.”
Four years earlier, at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, NBC newsman John Chancellor had been arrested on live television, saying, “I’ve been promised bail, ladies and gentlemen, by my office. This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.”
At the Democratic convention in Atlantic City that same summer, Robert Kennedy stood at the podium (less than a year after JFK’s assassination), and quoted Shakespeare, “When he shall die, take him and cut him out into the stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”
1980 was the last year I watched the conventions gavel-to-gavel. I hadn’t been expecting a disruption in the space-time continuum, but by then my personal bar for continuum disruption had been raised considerably. I was living that summer in a questionable house with the members of my comedy group. It had been a hard summer for us professionally, at least partly because we really weren’t all that funny. (Our best bit, for instance, was about an eggplant that appears on “To Tell the Truth.”) By midsummer we all came down with the flu, and there was nothing for us to do but lie around in the heat, eating chicken soup, and wheezing, and watching the television.
The Republicans gathered in Detroit that summer to nominate Ronald Reagan. Through our influenza-induced haze we watched the roll call of the states (“Mr. Speaker! The great state of Maine, home of the world’s greatest potatoes — casts all four of its electoral votes for — -”). We listened to Guy Vander Jagt deliver the keynote (one of the comedians suggested that “Vander Jagt” would be a good name for a liquor, anticipating the Jagermeister craze at least fifteen years early).
And then, as Walter Cronkite interviewed Gerald Ford, it appeared as if Ford was considering becoming Reagan’s vice-president, or “co-president,” as it was called then. For a half hour or so, it seemed as if the political world had gone delightfully haywire. A former president, as vice president? Hooray! But then Reagan announced his choice, George H.W. Bush, and that was that. Order was restored. We all did shots of Robitussen.
None of us — young hippies that we were — took Reagan seriously. We thought that his ideas — of reducing the national debt by lowering taxes, for instance — were crazy. We weren’t crazy about Carter, but the choice didn’t seem difficult.
“I’ve been promised bail, ladies and gentlemen, by my office. This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.”
Two weeks later we watched Carter deliver his keynote at the Democratic convention in New York. Carter stepped up to the microphone to praise the late Humbert Humphrey.
“We are the party of a great man who should have been president,” he said, “and who would have been one of the greatest presidents in history, Hubert Horatio Hornblower!”
There was a pause. “Uh-oh,” I said.
Carter’s gaffe was terribly embarrassing, of course, a painful reminder of his frequent inability to inspire the country. It was in that moment, perhaps, that I first realized that Ronald Reagan might actually win.
Up until then, we’d all assumed that Reagan was just a joke. A lot of people felt that way. Surely everyone would see through him — wouldn’t they? These were tough times — a merciless recession and instability in the Middle East — but Americans weren’t so shallow as to take someone like Ronald Reagan seriously. Were they?
Ladies and gentlemen, the great state of Maine casts all four of its electoral votes for the next President of the United States, Donald Trump!
